September 30, 2010

Did anyone else grasp the absurdity of the Cuomo rescue rally held at Academy Park on Thursday? The Quinnipiac poll that showed Carl Paladino only 6 points away from Attorney General Andrew Cuomo in the governor’s race really threw the Albany machine into a tizzy.

Cuomo spent the last few months trying to slice out a heaping helping of Republican and Independent support, moving more to the right in an attempt to score an overwhelming victory with a bipartisan majority.

But instead of facing the assumed Republican nominee, Rick Lazio, Cuomo is facing Paladino, a man his campaign reportedly salivated over the chance to run against. And at the moment, Cuomo’s Paladino lust seems misguided. A Lazio victory might have allowed Cuomo to make more entreaties to the other side of the aisle, but Paladino’s has changed things.

Cuomo finds himself needing to tend to his base—progressives, minorities, even, perhaps, labor, a group he has distanced himself from after promising stringent union negotiations and benefit reductions in his plan to reduce the state budget.

Rallying the Albany Democratic machine was not the way to bolster this support. In a governor’s race that centers around proving who is the bigger outsider, having Albany Mayor Jerry Jennings, a 17-year machine incumbent, come to the rescue was not the way to demonstrate independence. (While Jennings claimed to have organized the rally himself, Jimmy Vielkind of the Times Union reported that a Cuomo advance man was on the scene.)

Jerry Jennings is the standard bearer for disconnected Albany machine politics. He’s the kind of Democrat who denied for years that the neighborhoods he watched fall into progressively deeper despair were actually plagued by a gang problem.

Jennings is the man who backed a police chief who devastated the city’s community policing and allegedly motivated his police force to go after the murderers of a white college student by reminding them the victim was not just another “spook.”

Jennings’ olive branch to Arbor Hill during his mayoral primary against then-3rd Ward Councilman Corey Ellis was a program to paint fake window panes on boarded up buildings.

And at Thursday’s rally, Jennings stood amid a wall of old, white, machine politicians—including Albany County Legislator Brian Scavo, a man who has gotten himself into plenty of trouble and earned quite the reputation for misogyny— while the group condemned Carl Paladino with straight faces for his unseemly racist and misogynistic emails and attacked him for saying he is going to “take a baseball bat to Albany.” Jennings’ brand of political hardball far surpasses any threat to take a bat to a city. Don’t throw stones from a glass house, gentleman.

Jennings has been a Cuomo ally for years, and has done a lot of good fundraising work for him. But Jennings certainly isn’t motivating any progressives to rally behind the right-leaning Cuomo. At this point, everyone knows Cuomo has the machine; he needs to hope no one associates him with it. Cuomo seems uninterested in the kind of progressive agenda that helped ste Sen. Eric Schneiderman win the Democratic primary for Attorney General. It’s as if he assumes that Democratic voters have no other choice. They may not have another choice, but they don’t have to vote at all.

Republicans think they have a winner in Paladino, and they may very well be willing to put aside his eccentricities and unabashed racism to vote for him. Democrats, on the other hand, may be feeling apathetic or scandal-fatigued. They need a reason to show up at the polls.

Elinor Tatum, editor and publisher of New York Amsterdam News, the state’s oldest African-American newspaper, doesn’t think Cuomo is giving the African-American community a good reason to vote for him. She recently published a letter to Cuomo asking when he plans on actually reaching out to the minority community and speaking to urban issues. Cuomo hasn’t spoken to anyone from that paper since 2002.

“You have proved nothing to us,” the letter reads “You have showed us nothing that makes us want to stand strongly behind you. . . . We feel as though all too often, you have taken us for granted, and you have less than 40 days to turn this ship around.”

“Your dad lost to Pataki because of a loss of Black support back in 1994—a campaign you were involved in,” the letter continues.

The polls released following the 6-point-Quinnipiac Poll showed Cuomo where everyone figured he was—with a sizeable lead over Paladino. But Cuomo reacted by releasing the kind of attack ads he has condemned. Finally, this week he met with black leaders in New York City, where they all shared in a Paladino bashfest.

There is no denying Cuomo is the establishment candidate, or that he does not want to paint himself into a corner by appearing too liberal. But there are issues he could address that would send a message across the state that he is progressive. He could speak, as Schneiderman did, on ways to reduce gun violence in upstate and downstate cities—not about gun control, but how to deal with illegal guns, an issue residents of almost every city in New York State are all too familiar with—or on other issues common to upstate and downstate voters, like gas drilling in the Marcellus shale.

There is no doubt Cuomo has a monopoly on progressive ideas in the governor’s race. Paladino’s “Dignity Corps” proposal shows that fascism is an ideology likely close to his heart. But voters need to know that Cuomo has ideas—not just the machine, entitlement, and attack ads.

September 29, 2010

Ahead of EMPAC's massive weekend worth of events (otherwise known as Filament), there will be two free dress rehearsals of Yanira Castro's site-adaptive dance piece Wildernessopen to the public. The first is today at 7 PM and the second is tomorrow at 1 PM. Both events take place in the EMPAC lobby.

September 23, 2010

What does it take to beat an incumbent legislator in New York state? Short answer: a hell of a lot more than most challengers have.

The much ballyhooed defeat of Sen. Pedro Espada showed us that it helps if the incumbent has become the poster child for Albany dysfunction, has been slammed by the media for years, faces investigations at both the federal and state levels, stands accused of having used funds from a health clinic intended for HIV patients to finance campaign activities, lived outside their district, openly skirted campaign finance laws and filings, and actually paralyzed the state government for months for personal gain. It doesn’t hurt if the local political establishment—ward leaders, Democratic clubs—turn their backs on the incumbent.

Espada’s loss sent a message to most incumbents: You have to be in unbelievably bad shape to lose. Espada was a freshman senator, at his most vulnerable despite being made majority leader. Most other incumbents around the state have been in office for years. They’ve built fund-raising networks, have ground operations, enjoy massive union and party support and are household names in their respective communities.

Think about this: Senators who stood up early on in the race against Espada and endorsed the man who beat him were actually chastised by their colleagues for going against “one of our own.”

Oh, have I mentioned exactly who Espada’s challenger was? Gustavo Rivera’s resume highlights include: former New York City outreach director for Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand,constituency director for the Obama for America campaign in 2008, seasoned political operative who, earlier in his career, worked for Sen. Andrea Stewart-Cousins and oversaw one particularly hard-fought campaign for her. He is no schlub. In fact, he is expected to function as a shiny new star for Senate Democrats as they tout their reform agenda.

It wasn’t just experience; his connections helped. He won the backing of the New Roosevelt Initiative, an organization headed by Bill Samuels whose sole aim was to oust Espada. The Working Families Party also used its second-to-none, door-knocking, pavement-pounding, get-out-to-vote operation to hammer Rivera’s name home to residents of the 33rd Senate district.

But Espada’s loss was not reform. I had dinner with Rivera in a diner about half an hour before the polls closed. He promised, as he had throughout the campaign, that if elected, he would make sure constituents know where to find him, a very modest promise. But Espada’s behavior—hiding from constituents, canceling town hall gatherings when people who were not hand-selected threatened to show up, and saying that having voters petition, protest or even try to talk to him was a threat to his safety—make Rivera’s promise seem almost monumental.

Voters in the Bronx and across the state haven’t had the greatest menu of candidates. Last time out, Espada defeated Sen. Efrain Gonzalez, a man who was indicted at the time of the election for defrauding a nonprofit organization.

And so voters continue to expect less from their representatives every year.

Sen. Neil Breslin, who faced a well-financed opponent in Luke Martland and beat him with about 61 percent of the vote, had a simple route to victory: a campaign platform based on “I’m not with them.” All he had to do was say that he did better than the very worst and it got him reelected.

So what does all this mean? It means that if Ed Koch was right, if “in our lifetime there will never be a greater opportunity to clean up Albany” by “tossing the bums out,” then Albany is going to be filthy for quite a long time.If the anger was there, if the lust for change was in voters’ hearts, no one really took advantage of it.

There is still a general election to be waged. Democratic registration levels in Albany and most parts of New York City make that the odds of Republicans ousting incumbents unlikely. But in Western New York and Long Island, it seems likely that Republicans will pick up some Senate seats. The Senate could very well be back in Republican hands next year—not a particularly heartening thought for progressives.

And then, of course, there is Republican gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino, who has shown a terrific aptitude for taking advantage of anger. Is it in the governor’s race that we see voters’ anger at Albany manifested? Does the average Joe want to vote, not against anyone in particular, but for anger personified? It seems to go against almost everything we have come to assume about the New York State electorate, but could a perfect storm of upstate and Republican anger and Democratic apathy lead to a Paladino victory?

Doubtful. But if this isn’t the greatest opportunity to clean up Albany in our lifetimes, or if it was and it was wasted, maybe it is the greatest opportunity for voters to force Albany to face itself. Paladino, with his fearmongering and his status as an Albany insider who relies on millions of dollars of contracts from the state while claiming to be a reformer, represents the worst of what Albany has to offer. Maybe voters are so used to the state being run by dysfunctional, scandal-ridden, or ethically conflicted cartoon characters like Eliot Spitzer, Joe Bruno, David Paterson, Sheldon Silver and Dean Skelos that they will vote for Paladino to punish Democrats and Republicans alike. And what a punishment it would be!

—David King

David King is the state government editor of the online publication Gotham Gazette (gothamgazette.com).

September 17, 2010

Andrew Cuomo deserves to be challenged. He needs to be vetted, his policies should be contested line by line. But so far all Republican nominee Paladino has proven he can do is stir up hate and division. For the state’s sake, let’s hope Paladino finds something else to run on.

But it looks like that’s all he’s got.

A lot of Republicans got snowed on Tuesday night.

Paladino touts himself as an outsider who is “mad as hell” and wants to hit Albany with a baseball bat. Punchy, punchy, Hulk smash!

Yes, Rick Lazio ran a terrible campaign and, yes, he obsessed over the mosque rather than painting a coherent, policy-driven platform. He deserved to lose big.

But why would Paladino, a multimillionaire whose business relies on state contracts, really want to shake up Albany? And why would voters want to elect someone whose income relies so heavily on the state? The man has 27 contracts worth a total of $85 million leasing office space to state agencies.

Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver has rightly come under fire for not revealing the clients he represents or his stock portfolio; that ethical mire holds a plethora of potential conflicts of interest. So why would anyone want to put Carl Paladino in charge?

Why?

Because, like Rupert Murdoch, Paladino is a master of division. Of manipulating classes.

Paladino—the richest guy in most of the rooms on his campaign trail—is promising to slash Medicaid by $20 million, stomp out illegal immigrants and send inner-city youths to closed prisons for “training.”

Paladino would like you to think it is the poor and underprivileged who are draining the state’s coffers—not the complete fiscal mismanagement both parties have wrought for decades. And who wouldn’t want to be for stomping out the poor, letting them fend for themselves? No one wants to think of themselves as poor, right? So blame them. Blame the immigrants and the “inner-city” kids, too.

The people Paladino is selling this line to are, most likely, not in Paladino’s situation. They don’t have safety nets built from wads of cash. If they lose their jobs, end up in the hospital, or blighted by some other misfortune, they will probably be looking to the state for assistance. It doesn’t mean they are bums or that they should be pushed out of New York. It means they are relying on the social tools created to assist people in need, so that one turn of fate does not leave them on the street. So that they can eventually resume a place as productive members of society—even as consumers who can assist the economy’s recovery.

Do people abuse these tools? Yes. But to suggest that social services are bankrupting the state is absurd. It amounts not only to class warfare, but to hate-mongering.

“We’re going to send out a message for the whole country: New York is no longer a haven for the poor and disenfranchised and illegals,” Paladino said at a campaign event in Troy earlier this month.

“Stay home. Stay where you are. Our budget will be to serve the people of New York, not strangers.”

People may relate to Paladino because he is not well-spoken; he puts on the aura of the angry average Joe. But Paladino is far from average. He is a man who can dump millions of his own dollars into his gubernatorial campaign. Can you do that? I know I can’t.

Is your net worth estimated at $150 million? Do you have the money and ability, as The New York Timesreported Paladino does, to funnel money to state legislators on both sides of the aisles to grease the machine?

Would you have the audacity to claim you are an Albany outsider after being so thoroughly involved in Albany’s favorite money game?

When Paladino says he is “mad as hell” at New York State government, do you think he is mad about your property taxes, mad that you might lose your job?

If you were caught sending racist, sexist, porn-filled e-mails, would you keep your job, let alone consider running for public office?

It worked out for Paladino because he has money to burn. And, in the end, what Paladino will bring to the race against Cuomo will be money and personality. Personality as in the racist, poor-bashing, immigrant-loathing character that Paladino has already displayed.

September 13, 2010

Kirsten Gillibrand has shifted her stances drastically since representing the 20th district. She deserves an opponent who will challenge her on her flip-flopping and test her newly discovered commitment to gay-rights and other recent progressive stances. But Gail Goode is not the challenger to do it. Goode’s argument (when she has found time to make it) has been that New York City residents should not have to just accept an upstater like Gillibrand as their representative. We agree they shouldn’t have to; upstaters should not just have to accept Gillibrand either. But Goode has not presented a good (no pun intended) reason to vote for her.

Gillibrand does remember her upstate roots. She was the first in congress to make her schedule public. Her commitment to transparency is admirable and, if she sticks to her new progressive agenda while working with Senior State Senator Chuck Schumer, upstate New York should see some real results.

Sure, Sen. Neil Breslin had a rough couple of years. He looked a bit lost presiding over the senate during the coup. Who wouldn’t have been? And he gave an embarrassing answer during a T.V. interview. But Breslin has provided steady, coherent leadership in the senate while others were irrational, crazed and completely out for themselves. Breslin should have done more to distinguish himself publically, spoken out more vocally against the troublemakers, despite the backlash he could have faced from his party. He should have pressed harder for more legislation to benefit his district while nothing much else was getting done. But Breslin deserves a chance to accomplish more while his party is in the majority (if they retain the majority). His challenger Luke Martland has run a fiercely negative campaign, based on anti-incumbency, but has done very little to establish what he would do differently than the incumbent.

Had there been an actual discourse about the issues, Metroland would likely have endorsed in this race. Andrew Cuomo should not have a free pass to the governor’s mansion. But both Republican candidates turned their primary into a contest to see who could drag the discourse deeper into the mud. The mosque debate may be a visceral issue for some but it is not an issue that should define this race. We expected this out of Carl Paladino. He established himself very early on as a racist, and enemy of the poor. But Lazio made a very cynical move to keep up with Paladino’s trashy politics. It is a shame that both men have tarnished their party and insulted voters. A vote for either man is a vote wasted.

Republican Primary for US Senate: No Endorsement

This may be the Republican year nationwide but it aint happening in New York. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand should be facing steep competition from Democrats and Republicans alike, but she isn’t. She deserves an established challenger based on the fact that she was appointed—not to mention her flip-flopping on issues such as gay rights and gun control. Unfortunately, everyone with a chance in hell chickened out. David Malpass, Joe DioGuardi and Bruce Blakeman have failed to define themselves in positive ways. And Malpass’ fixation on the mosque issue has been particularly disgusting.

There is an embarrassment of riches in the Democratic race for attorney general. And yet, in this impressive lineup, one candidate is clearly more qualified, distinguished, battle tested and ready to stand up for progressive causes. That candidate is Sen. Eric Schneiderman.

Schneiderman spent 10 years in the senate fighting for his political life while Republicans tried to oust him because he refused to compromise. When his party finally took over the majority Schneiderman was able to push through the Rockefeller Drug Law reform he had advocated for years.

Asssemblyman Richard Brodsky has a record of achieving reform as a legislator, but his abrasive style, ego and recent push to get attention for his stance against the proposed mosque makes it impossible to recommend him.

Eric Dinallo is an attractive choice because of the time he spent working with former attorney general Eliot Spitzer and pioneering innovative ways to go after Wall Street. But his campaign has demonstrated that he is a political novice; it is doubtful he could survive the general election.

Sean Coffey touts his credentials as a political outsider, but he has struggled to make the case that this will help him be a successful attorney general. His massive contributions to various candidates also make his case that he is a political outsider that much less believable.

Finally Nassau County District Attorney Kathleen Rice has done good work against drunk driving in her county, but it is clear that she needs more political seasoning before running for a job as complicated at attorney general. It is disturbing that Rice did not vote until she was 37. This makes her seem all the more like a political construction than an established candidate with belief in sound policy.

Schneiderman’s long history as a progressive, his sure work in the legislature while chaos and opposition surrounded him, his commitment to establishing field offices across the state and his fervent stance against illegal firearms outweigh any concerns that he was part of the dysfunctional State Senate.

The attacks on Schneiderman claiming that he could lose the general election to Staten Island District Attorney Daniel Donovan seem rather lame. Schneiderman will be running as a progressive reformer alongside Andrew Cuomo during an election season in New York where Republicans have little reason to head to the polls.

September 10, 2010

Right around this time last year, Sina Hickey launched Paper Girl Albany, a project she adopted from a group in Germany that delivers handmade, original art to random strangers via bike, similar to old-fashioned newspaper delivery.

Today (Sept. 10), she'll take to the streets in Albany to deliver the work of nearly 120 artists. The ride starts at 2 PM, and if you'd like to join in, meet up is at 1 PM. Email Sina for more info: PaperGirl.Albany@gmail.com.